Sandaysoft

You're very welcome! I'll be posting the updates on http://saratoga-weather.org/wxtemplates/updates.php later today.

Thank YOU for your patience in working through the issues.

Best regards,
Ken

I'm having a weird issue where it's not displaying "Gust Today" on my site...

I only noticed it the other day, not sure how long it's been doing it. I think it might have been after I applied the updates from Jan 14th although it could be longer.

http://www.grudzien.us

You can see under the wind section, its displaying

and it's taking up two lines in doing so. Normally the "Gust Today" line would be above it, but for some reason it's just not showing it. I've noticed on other sites January is shortened to "Jan.".. perhaps because January is forcing it to take up two lines, and that's what's messing it up? If that's what might be causing it, how do I set it to use short month names? (I have checked WUtags.php and it is passing the gust from today along.. its just not displaying it)

For fun I went through and I completely redid my entire site (Deleting all files on root folder of website and redoing the entire setup) and I still have the same issue. I'm using the latest version of Cumulus 1.9.2 build 1028.

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That was my bad
I did a fix to eliminate a Notice: errata, and misspelled the test variable name, so the Gust for Today: was never printed (even if is was there).

That's now fixed in the 22-Jan-2012 updates available now from the updates page.

Regarding the former abbreviation (first 3 characters of the month name) in the Gust this month display.. that didn't work out when the template went to UTF-8 for Hebrew display, so I made it just display the full month name (entered in the language-ll.js file). We'd never had an 'official' abbreviation for the month name in any of the translation tables, but did have the full month name available, so I just took the 'easy road' and removed the substr(...,0,3) from the variable so now it works with all languages, but does overflow to two lines.

Hope this helps...

Best regards,
Ken

That did it! Thanks Ken!! Again... you do amazing work!

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Thanks for the kind words!

I've been trying to bundle updates a bit better so there are fewer 'releases' to annoy folks with.
Fortunately, after 79 updates to the V3 template set, the bugs have been mostly worked out
However, it's my international users who are invaluable in spotting issues that need addressing due to locale .. Toddi's dd.mm.yy date format I'd not encountered before, so it's good to get everything working with that format too.

Best regards,
Ken

I often wondered how you keep track of all the 'working' and 'tweaks' versions of your many and large code sets.

... but now I've got too many (tweaks) of my own

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......................Imagine, what you will KNOW tomorrow !

It is a challenge to keep all the stuff in order, but here's what I do:

The master code sets for the Base and Plugin configs are kept in the distribution .zip files on the website (with master copies on my development PC). The development PC is backed up nightly to a local NAS with 3 weeks of weekly full/daily incremental backups.

The test website http://saratoga-weather.org/wxtemplates ... xindex.php is the working development copy of the template set. Thanks to a bit of simplification in the templates from V2 to V3, I dropped the three single-language (English) templates and two ML templates in favor of three multi-lingual-capable templates that share the same code base for USA, Canada and World. The Settings-weather.php allows any of the templates to operate with any of the supported weather-station software, and I run all 6 (Cumulus, Meteohub, VWS, Weather-Display, WeatherLink and WeatherSnoop) to upload to the website. Each page on the test site can have a ?wx= argument to load a different Settings-weather file so I can easily see the effects on the page. I also run the PHP there with both Notify: and Strict: enabled to try and catch as many little issues as possible before release.

The Base templates contain the regional support scripts for that area, and all the AJAX scripts for the software pre-configured for English or Metric units. The common (non-regional) scripts are identical across all the Base templates (things like getting UV info, MOON/season info, METAR data).

Where possible, each of the scripts has internal version information in comments (and sometimes in code), and my updates page can parse that out of the source to show on the updates page (which uses the distribution .zip files as source).

I maintain a master page http://saratoga-weather.org/scripts-history.php which has the details on all changes to the standalone scripts and templates .. it's also automatically read by the RSS feed for changes.

With the updates page, I've tried to make it easy for the template users to grab all the changes since they last installed into one package, and given advice on which are generally safe to just replace v.s. which may need customization.

It would likely been easier on me to set up a version control system, but it's a little late to convert now, and since there's only one developer for my distributions, probably not much better than what I'm doing now.

And yes, I do keep a mass of scripts tucked away in both PHP and perl to take snippets from to construct new things (no sense in reinventing something).

I have posted the question in a separate thread but Ken might be the person to answer my question so i will ask here. Basically i want to run 2 identical versions of my website on 2 different servers. Cumulus has the facility to upload to one server. Steve has suggested using this method http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/SFTP What template files do i need to upload to the server in order to have a fully working site with live updates? Currently this is how the two sites look. http://www.waterfordcityweather.com/index.php http://www.waterfordweather.com

Regards

Mick

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http://www.waterfordweather.com

Hi Mick,

The key things that need to be uploaded after generation by Cumulus on both sites (for your weather conditions and history to show properly) are:

CUtags.php
realtime.txt
images/ (the graphs generated by Cumulus)
Reports/ (the NOAA climate reports)

The remainder of the pages on a template site are generated dynamically from the above list, or via the scripts which access external websites for data (WU-forecast, get-METAR-conditions.txt get-sunmoon-info.php, get-meteoalarm-warning, quakeUK.php)

Hope this helps...

Best regards,
Ken

Thanks Ken

I think the files you mentioned should be no problem to upload to another server but i may have problems with the CUtags.php file as this is generated from a txt file in the Cumulus software.

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http://www.waterfordweather.com

I just set up a new weather station (a Davis Vantage Vue) with Cumulus and the latest version of this AJAX/PHP template, and I think I've got it mostly working, except for the "Summary" icon and "Outlook" icon.

I'm at a place in the Philippines where there is no reliable weather forecast available, and the nearest METAR report is 166km to the south. So I've tried to disable the weather forecasting and just use the Davis supplied forecast.

I notice the Summary icon is often wrong -- for example, it will say it's raining when my station reports no rain. And there's no Outlook icon at all.

Is there a way I can use my station's data for the Summary icon, and the the Davis supplied forecast for the Outlook icon?

Thanks.

You can access the weather station here:

http://www.sfcweather.com/

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The Outlook is missing because you are not using WU-forecast.php to get the forecast for your area.
It appears you are using the USA template Settings.php file and not the World template Settings.php.

http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.28.98752

For the World template settings, you'd need to configure

and have WU-forecast.php available on your website (which it does not seem to be).

Did you happen to install the Base-USA instead of the Base-World template?

If the nearest METAR is too far from your site to be meaningful, you can suppress the display of a summary condition by changing Settings-weather to so the scripts won't try to use a METAR.

Unfortunately, there is no current code to use the Cumulus icon numbers or the Davis forecast as the summary image with the template set

Hope this helps...

Best regards,
Ken

Yes, I installed the Base-USA template -- I wasn't sure if it would make a big difference. I'll probably just keep the weather forecast disabled for now, since even the Weather Underground forecast is wrong. For example, what they have listed as La Union, Philippines, is actually more than 1,000km away.



Thanks for this -- I don't know how I missed it. I just commented out the conditionsMETAR, and the summary icon is getting supressed now.

Thanks for your help.

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Just a heads-up to all the World template users: WeatherUnderground changed their website on 1-Feb-2012 and now disallow non-browser access to their main pages, and this has caused the WU-forecast.php script to become inoperative, and really not fixable. I'm redesigning the WU-forecast.php script (V2) to use their new JSON API instead, and I hope to have a release in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, your dashboard and wxforecast.php pages will be missing the icons and text for your forecasts.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Best regards,
Ken

Status update:

I talked via email with John Celenza of WeatherUnderground and the issue with the WU-forecast.php script was caused by an IP block by WunderGround on my server's IP address. They have kindly removed the block, and the script works again.

I did do an update to WU-forecast.php V1.28 tonight to add the ability to follow the 301 redirect to their block.asp page, and cache the contents in the cache file. If it happens that you find no forecast, even after doing a ?force=1 to force a cache refresh, then check the contents of your cache file (do a view source on the page to find the name/location of the file), and in the file will be the text of the block page .. you can use the IP address there to contact WU to ask the block be removed.

I also changed the request to include a User-agent: PHP,WU-forecast.php,saratoga-weather.org so they can identify that the request was made by the WU-forecast.php script (and that they should contact me for questions).

Sorry for the alarm .. in short:
1) WU was blocking some IPs for excessive traffic (I think)
2) The script couldn't get past the block, so stopped offering you a forecast.
3) the updated script V1.28 has diagnostics to help you put a request to WU to unblock if it happens to you

Updates for V3 template users or for non-template users.

I am working (and about 80% finished) with a WU API JSON script and will release it later, but the WU-forecast.php can live on to serve

Best regards,
Ken